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by Quecksilver_Eyes



Series: We're not meant to be alone [7]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: AH YES, Depression, Gen, M/M, Temporary Character Death, aka booker was a forger and im like, blood tw, imposter syndrome, in which Sebastien dies a deserter and a forger and doesn't quite know what do with his life; after, perfect metaphor material
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:22:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26239291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: Sebastien feels like a coin under a magnifying glass; scraped and carved until it looks just like the ones in his wallet, until not even the light could tell what is counterfeit and what is real. The candle flickers in the soft wind  and his hands tremble with art not his own, tucked into a basement in Marseille.Sometimes, he thinks he never stopped being a forger.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: We're not meant to be alone [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1906879
Comments: 24
Kudos: 190





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Yusuf’s scimitar is dripping with blood. Andromache’s labrys lies heavy and sullied in her hands. Nicolo’s longsword is buried in the heaving chest of a desperate man with Sebastien’s life smeared on his palms. Nicolo’s eyes are like glass; blown and spun and shattered in the cold Russian winter, Yusuf’s hands are calloused and warm on Sebastien’s forehead as his toes uncurl and his lungs ache for air.

Sebastien feels like a coin under a magnifying glass; scraped and carved until it looks just like the ones in his wallet, until not even the light could tell what is counterfeit and what is real. The candle flickers in the soft wind and his hands tremble with art not his own, tucked into a basement in Marseille.

Sometimes, he thinks he never stopped being a forger.

Yusuf paints, in between his prayers and Nicolo’s words, quiet and certain woven about them, and Sebastien watches the way his hands move, the way he prepares his canvas, the way he mixes his colours, the way he sketches with a certainty born of centuries of practice. His technique is as old as his scimitar, sometimes – and then it’s younger than Sebastien himself; raw and new and barely dead.

The first time he tries to replicate it, his children are still alive. His brushes don’t make the same marks that Yusuf’s do, so his painting doesn’t look quite right; too broad, and too mudded, the curve of Nicolo’s jaw not quite sharp enough, the millennia in Andromache’s eyes not quite worn enough. He paints over it in broad, white strokes.

The bajonet lies heavy and unyielding in Sebastien’s hands. Cleaning it is a slow, methodical thing as Nicolo sharpens the other weapons on a whetstone next to him, idly singing something that might be a prayer or a song in a language Sebastien has no grasp of. Andromache is precise as a breath with her labrys – against swords and bullets and men with war dripping from their lips, Yusuf’s scimitar cuts through lungs and hearts and throats with barely a sound, and Nicolo’s longsword is a lethal, calm thing. Sebastien’s bajonet feels clunky in his hands.

 _"_ I am a warrior", says Andromache around a mouthful of shakshouka, and the woman in Sebastien’s dreams dies screaming her name.

_What is your name?_

Nicolo reaches for a piece of bread. "We all are _"_ , he says and breaks it in half. Yusuf takes it with a smile that softens his eyes in a way that makes Sebastien’s skin ache. He takes a bite of the food and thinks of the bajonet in his hands, and of the way he knows the path of Yusuf’s hands across a canvas better than he knows the bullets and the blades.

He tries Nicolo’s longsword next. The handle is simple, sturdy, and Sebastien doesn’t need his magnifying glass for it; tries metal after metal until the weight of it feels right in his hands. After the seventh sword, the blade lies straight and heavy across his table, and Sebastien starts to work on the sheath. Leather, perhaps.

He dies on the next mission wedged in between terror and bullets. There’s a gasp in his lungs and a rope around his neck and cold creeping so deeply into his bones that his legs give in under the weight of it.

When he heaves back alive, the floor is dyed red with blood and men. Yusuf is wiping down the blades with the coat of one of the men who strung Sebastien up by the neck, and Andromache grins at him – blood splattered and sharp teethed and alive. “Welcome back, asshole”, she says.

“We are warriors”, says Quynh, in the echo of his dream. “Now wake up.”

Sebastien buries a new love every spring, as the ground has barely thawed and the world has barely awoken, sluggish and stiff and quiet, and Andromache’s frown deepens with each grave he digs. Sebastien makes a new batch of francs, cramped into a corner of a safehouse with barely enough space for them all to lie down. Yusuf lies curled around Nicolo, his face buried in his neck, their breathing in sync like the way they fight; something effortless and trusting.

In the kitchen, Andromache downs an entire bottle of vodka. Quynh screams.

Jean-Pierre dies last. Jean-Pierre dies cursing and tear drowned and with hate choking him, all the coins Sebastien has ever carved for him scattered across the floor; a heaving, blood-tinted thing. Centuries later, hidden in a cave and faced with a woman as new as thawing spring, Sebastien will look at her and offer her this, his memory, as if Jean-Pierre’s cancer had eaten away at his own lungs, too.

Quynh dies and lives with every glass, every bottle, every weapon that lies trembling in Sebastien’s hands. “Tell them”, she says, and Sebastien finds a paint brush just like Yusuf’s on a market. He doesn’t barter for it.

Sometimes, when Nicolo and Yusuf move as one, when Andromache’s labrys is like a holy thing, Sebastien can barely hold onto his gun, always behind her; his shoulders strained and aching. He shoots and the bullet hits where it is meant to for the first time when he is just over a century old. There are replicas of all their weapons in a basement in Marseille that none of them have ever entered – the curve of Yusuf’s scimitar, the line of Nicolo’s longsword, the intricacy of Andromache’s labrys.

In his dreams, Quynh describes her archery to him. It takes him fifty years to replicate her bow, and another twenty for her arrows. “When this coffin has rotted around me”, she says in between her deaths one night, her mouth a determined line muddled by salt water, “I will use these arrows.”

Sebastien forges new passports for all of them.

“We are warriors”, says Andromache under a starry night sky stretched out above her. “You are one of us.”

Sebastien tilts his head back. The sky above them is a dark, glittering thing, and if he tilts his head just right, he can see the constellations of Andromache’s childhood; shifted and warped. If he tried, he could make a map of them and the way they wrap around the earth. “I cannot die”, he says quietly. “Does that make me a warrior?”

Andromache looks at him, her eyes a storm.

When Yusuf looks at him with a smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes, Sebastien feels like a note held up into the light, half transparent, half pressed into shape. He wonders how long it will be until they notice that the light doesn’t fall through him quite right.

How long does it take to recognise a counterfeit note, and its poisoned edges?


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